"The Man Who Stopped the Earth."
By Henry J. Kostkos (1900-77; ISFDb HERE).
First appearance: Amazing Stories, March 1934.
Reprints page (ISFDb HERE).
Short short short story (3 pages).
Online at The Pulpgen Archive (HERE).
"You have truly evolved a stupendous theory. And I have unwittingly proved it for you, though there be none left to profit by it."
IT isn't just in war that a Pyrrhic victory can be achieved, as that self-described "great scientist" Kirkland Rizzert is about to prove . . .
Principal characters:
~ Markrum, Rizzert, and Wirrtel.
References:
- "atom isolagraph":
No idea.
- "galvanometer":
"A galvanometer is an electromechanical measuring instrument for electric current. Early galvanometers were uncalibrated, but improved versions, called ammeters, were calibrated and could measure the flow of current more precisely. Galvanometers work by deflecting a pointer in response to an electric current flowing through a coil in a constant magnetic field. The mechanism is also used as an actuator in applications such as hard disks." (Wikipedia HERE.)
- "wave atomic theory":
When our story was published, whether atomic particles were solid or waves was still unsettled:
"In 1924, Louis de Broglie proposed that all particles—particularly subatomic particles such as electrons—have an associated wave. Erwin Schrödinger, fascinated by this idea, developed an equation that describes an electron as a wave function instead of a point. This approach predicted many of the spectral phenomena that Bohr's model failed to explain, but it was difficult to visualize and faced opposition. One of its critics, Max Born, proposed instead that Schrödinger's wave function did not describe the physical extent of an electron (like a charge distribution in classical electromagnetism), but rather gave the probability that an electron would, when measured, be found at a particular point. This reconciled the ideas of wave-like and particle-like electrons: the behavior of an electron, or of any other subatomic entity, has both wave-like and particle-like aspects, and whether one aspect or the other is observed depend upon the experiment." (Wikipedia HERE.)
- "Our earth moves in a complex path; it rotates, travels in its orbit around the sun, the sun carries us through the galactic system, the galactic system speeds us amid the spiral nebulae":
"Earth orbits the Sun at an average distance of 149.60 million km (92.96 million mi), or 8.317 light-minutes, in a counterclockwise direction as viewed from above the Northern Hemisphere. One complete orbit takes 365.256 days (1 sidereal year), during which time Earth has traveled 940 million km (584 million mi)." (Wikipedia HERE.)
"The Solar System travels alone through the Milky Way in a circular orbit approximately 30,000 light years from the Galactic Center. Its speed is about 220 km/s. The period required for the Solar System to complete one revolution around the Galactic Center, the galactic year, is in the range of 220–250 million years." (Wikipedia HERE.)
"How fast is Earth's orbit around the sun?
"Earth orbits around the sun at a speed of 67,100 miles per hour (30 kilometers per second). That's the equivalent of traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Cape Town (or alternatively London to New York) in about 3 minutes.
"Other than in its orbit, how else is Earth moving through space?
"As well as moving around the Sun, the Sun and Earth are orbiting around the dense center of our galaxy at some 447,000 miles per hour (200 km/s). Our galaxy, in turn, is moving relative to the other galaxies around us, and so all the mass in the universe is continuously dancing around." (Space.com HERE).
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- "the night wind outside whistled under the eaves of the frame building. A flash of lightning foretold the coming of a storm and distant thunder rumbled menacingly above the tearing of the wind"; "By this time the storm outside raged with fury. The laboratory was lit up brilliantly by flashes of lightning. The three old men instinctively drew closer together."
These are examples of the pathetic fallacy:
"The phrase pathetic fallacy is a literary term for the attribution of human emotion and conduct to things found in nature that are not human. It is a kind of personification that occurs in poetic descriptions, when, for example, clouds seem sullen, when leaves dance, or when rocks seem indifferent." (Wikipedia HERE.)
Resources:
- Our author, Henry J. Kostkos, generated a remarkably few science fiction stories, most of them for Amazing Stories and a couple for Astounding. Otherwise, we know practically nothing about him.
- The Pulpgen Archive collection of 63 tales from Amazing Stories is (HERE).
The bottom line:
Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.
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